The survival of a Pacific Islander population in North Queensland 1900-1940

Abstract

One of the first Acts enacted by the Parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia prohibited the recruitment of Pacific Islanders to work in Queensland from 1904. By 1908 the majority of these Islanders had been deported from Australia. The small number who remained, legally or illegally, were one of several non-European groups who served as reminders of ‘white’ multi-racial past. This thesis draws on not only conventional historical sources but also oral evidence and local records to examine the survival, in demographic, economic, social and cultural respects, of a Pacific Islander population in north Queensland in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Like other non-indigenous non-European groups, those islanders were subjected to a campaign, spearheaded by the labour movement, to exclude them from all favoured occupations and civic privileges. Despite and, indeed, as a result of such obstacles, they developed a sense of identity and community which marked them as a distinctive ethnic group. By 1940 the demographic and cultural survival of this Pacific Islander population was assured.